Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

And here's your 30-second summary!

History paints her as a purveyor of sex and death, but sometimes my friends, a cow just dies in the desert.

And sometimes a flower is just a flower.

The... and...

Let's talk about Georgia O'Keefe.

But first let's drop her into history. In 1887, Melville-Duey, the creator of the Duey Decimal System, opened the first library school at Columbia College.

The world's largest recorded snowflake measuring 15 inches in diameter, fell during a Montana snowstorm.

Construction of the Eiffel Tower began, and Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller met and began their work together.

Queen Victoria celebrated her golden Jubilee, Celluloid, Photographic Film, the mechanized Elevator Door, and the Grimphone were all patented,

Social activists, Dorothy Adix, Swedish Nightingale, Gen. Lind, and Liberty Poet, M. Lazarus all died.

And in November of 1887, the future mother of American modernism was born.

Georgia, Tato O'Keefe was born on November 15th, 1887, in a Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, the second of the seven children of Frank Collick's to Sokefe and Ida Tenike Tato O'Keefe.

Papah and Mama grew up together as neighbors. Papah's parents had been relatively unusually Irish immigrants of property, and had been able to set themselves up quite nicely with good farmland,

servants in the house, four healthy sons, silver service, you know, all the important things.

They were very settled. Grandpa O'Keefe, however, died when Papah was still in school, but still with men to run the farm economically the family was just fine.

Mama was descended from a Hungarian count and a descendant of someone that wrote over on the Mayflower, though this does not carry the monetary cache, the filthy lucre that you might imply from that, unfortunately for her, but there was

an exciting ancestry. Grandma and Grandpa Tato had six children. Mama was toward the end, and when she was 12, her father went back to Hungary to check on property, he said.

So the O'Keefe neighbors sons were asked to farm the land for a while. Get this, Grandpa Tato never came back from Hungary.

He was a flood because he picked the wrong side in a revolution, and it was either flee or die. So he left Hungary with nothing really landed in New York, met his wife's father, and then bounced out to Wisconsin.

So he didn't have it too much, and he didn't have a background in farming, and his wife grew up in New York City.

So life down the farm had consisted of two people who have no idea how to live on a farm.

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